Mouths

My mouth is large and loud like that picture when I was two and yelling Os around chocolate cake turned a bloody colour in an aging photograph. My mouth shouts and hollers, and it is nothing in particular. It is about how my favourite shirt got old or how I miss how it was that one summer or how it is fucking tiring having to live in this meaty body. Then, my mouth is that tiny O that almost whistled when I quietly sang oooh-oooh-oooh around the campfire, and it was like no one else was there, so blinded was I by the flames. My small mouth only breathes tight, cool streams of air and moves unnoticed around the vowels of words that I am thinking, and this soothes me when out loud is painful. It keeps things quiet and stops them rolling around like loose marbles. There is too much mouth or too little mouth. It is stretched wide and tight, straining and voluble and nobody wants it, not even me, or it is pursed and withholding, keeping the last word safe, because if the last word were heard, it might be stolen. The middle mouth bores itself with its salability and social ease, or it begs cock or cosmetics or convenience. It fears itself a whore: c'mere, c'mere, c'mere, go 'way. The middle mouth is a typo, a slip; it is freudian. Even its silences will give it away. We already know what the big mouth and the small mouth do. They are the kind of safe that warrants discomfort. They are the kind of safe that anticipates the measured pain.